As we discussed last week, The Clone Wars is kicking it up into high fear for its final arc. Let’s not waste any more time.
1. Battle of the apprentices who walked away
Although Maul vs Obi-Wan has been identified as the big conflict in the Filoni corner of Star Wars, Maul and Ahsoka are really the parallel characters of this story. Both rejected some aspects of their masters’ teaching, felt that they were manipulated, but kept the central tenets as they departed. Maul didn’t stop being evil, nor did Ahsoka stop fighting for what is right and good.
And yet, when they meet for the first time here, Maul instantly grasps their kinship, and is greedy or naïve enough to think he can turn Ahsoka. Ahsoka, on the other hand, is single minded in her need to stop Maul. But the most important thing that happens in this dual – and we’ll get back to it later – is that Maul succeeds in sowing seeds of doubt in Ahsoka, vis a vis Anakin. He tells Ahsoka that he’s been groomed as his – Maul’s – most recent replacement by Darth Sidious, which is the first time that anyone, but especially Ahsoka, has doubted Anakin’s dedication to the Jedi Order. Sure, he’s impetuous and unorthodox, but that’s not the same as thinking that he may betray everyone he’s ever known.
2. Anakin gossip
One of the major issues of the prequel films is that Anakin goes from ‘great Jedi who can’t keep it in his pants’ to ‘child murderer’ in about 45 minutes, instead of building over time. This episode attempts to say that “hey, if you knew what to look for, that transformation wouldn’t be so confounding.” Of course, the flip side of that is the fact that we all learned Anakin Skywalker went rogue in 1980, and George Lucas still couldn’t effectively give us that story. But the fact that Maul, as a former apprentice himself, could see what was happening, is an attempt to correct this error.
This is further reflected in Obi-Wan and Ahsoka’s conversation about Anakin. Ahsoka is shocked and upset that the Jedi have asked Anakin to spy on Palpatine, but she doesn’t really seem to doubt the decision that Palpatine needs surveillance. She is upset by how the Jedi Council is asking Anakin to do something that will harm him. Obi-Wan senses this as well, and basically asks Ahsoka to intercede on behalf of the Council and speak to Anakin about how this is the ‘right’ thing to do.
This scene really played into another piece of this arc, which we saw established last week, which is to dirty up Obi-Wan a bit. Obi-Wan in the prequels has an almost superhuman constitution, never really doing anything wrong at all. Here, we see him in full politician mode, ignoring the needs of his ‘brother’ for the good of the institution. Last week, Obi-Wan was portrayed as the practical soldier, and it is an interesting move to attempt to show the problems of the Jedi permeate all Jedi, even the ones we like.
3. The Sith position
Perhaps one of the reasons that Obi-Wan needed to be a company man is because the Sith are always about solely themselves. The Sith are defined by their selfishness and greed, and so Obi-Wan, being the avatar of the Jedi, needs to project something more than himself. His counterweight, Maul, is instead using hurt and fear to attempt to gain power. Ahsoka instantly rejects the power grab, because she is a Jedi at her heart. Anakin eventually takes it, not because he is any less of a Jedi, but because Anakin has chosen love over the order. Even though Anakin isn’t in this episode, and Obi-Wan only appears briefly, this episode does a really fine job of establishing, or rather, restating, the party lines going into the final two episodes.
4. Small mistakes
This next bit has spoilers for Star Wars Rebels, so be warned.
Even though this episode is technically the ‘middle’ event, we have now seen Maul felled by simplicity. For a great warrior who has put into motion plans that have their roots all across the galaxy, he is chopped in half by a padawan, captured literally feet from his escape ship, and then killed in three moves by an old man who didn’t know he was coming. It says a lot about Maul as a character, and this one seemed particularly tragic.
Continued belowWhen he and Ahsoka are fighting in the beams leading up to the sky, he not only holds his own against her, but manages to dislodge both of her lightsabers, leaving her unarmed against his double bladed saber. But she simply uses her weight and his momentum to throw him off the beam, and then, using the Force, suspends him while he is captured. Maul is screaming, asking for death, but she refuses. It is a scene that elicits genuine sympathy for Maul, and proves, yet again, that Ahsoka is not a failed Jedi. The Jedi are a failed idea.
5. The final two episodes
I got into a discussion with my DC3 partners last night about how much time elapses in Revenge of the Sith, because I feel like the next two episodes need to happen slightly after this, in order to give us the true tragedy of The Clone Wars, which is Order 66. To see the clones, who are every bit as heroic as the Jedi in this series, turn against their friends and masters, will be really tough to watch. I am 90% sure we will see that.
What I am less certain about is if we will see an Anakin/Ahsoka confrontation. In last week’s episode, Anakin did everything but hug and spin her around to show his joy at her return. What will he do if/when he sees her before he becomes Vader? Will he try to recruit her? Will he push her away? I can’t wait to find out.
